42 A REPORTER AT LARGE INDONESIA II-THE RISE AND FALL OF GUIDED DEMOCRACY O NE of the strangest politi- cal event to take place anywhere during this centur} was, undoubtedlv, the transforrnation of the huge new island repub- hc of Indonesia, at the beginning of the pres- en t decade, from a furnbling parliamen tary dernocracy into a phan- tasrnagoric oligarch) led by the nat )n.'s flarnboyant rrr>".r1r> 1t.. Sukarno. j-\r:.-:id " 1"' :n- oply of ritualistic sym- bols and political in- cantations vaguely de- rived frorn Javanese rnysticisrn, he dazed his people with a torren t uf catch} slogans and acronyrns based on a rnishrnash of French, Eng- lish, Javanese, and anything else that occurred to hirn, the whole arnounting to his own verSIon of Newspeak. All of this rnade it easy to condernn Sukarno as a charlatan, but there was rnore to him, and to h;s rnethods, than that. HIs cultural revivalisrn, his use of mystical imagery to aroUSe revolutionary fervor, his creation and prolongation of crises, his ad ven turistic foreign activities and rnan ufacture of external enernIes to serve as scapegoats-these were aU the fruits of calculation on Sukarno's part; essen tially, they were tactics designed to take people's rninds off their abject poverty, to ll1ask the governrnent's in- abilit) to deal with the econornic and social situation in a rdtiondJ way. Uhi- rnately, Sukarno's policies led his coun- t} y to the bÓnk of a Cornmunist t.:lke- over and his countryrnen to shocking rnass killings, after which he W lS ig- norniniously tossed aside. }\ny nationalist revolution, whether violen t or peaceful, is concerned as ll1uch with a search for identity as with a search for freedon1. In August, 1950, when a nornina11} united RepubJic of Indonesia repLlced a brief eÀperimcnt in federalism ca1led the Republic of the United States of Indonesia-to which the Dutch had gran ted independence and recognition the previous year-- there 1110mentarily existed, in ernbry- onic forrn, a shared outlook that could be described as the only real concept of identity rnodern Indonesia hds ever if -= had. True, the Dutch were still rnéln- aging to hang on to their econornic holdings-in fact, they were to do so for seven more yèars-but at that clirnactic rnornen t in 1950 all of Indo- nesia, except for a few puckets of colonial resistance, considered itself one, emotionally at least, under the titular leadership of Sukarno, as President, and the parliarnentary leadership of IVluhammad Natsir, the PrÏrne Minis- ter. However, the governrnent of the fledgling republic faced, as had the Dutch colonial governrnent before it, the gigantic task of extending its au- thoritv and control across the whole chain of three thousand islands, with their widely varying power structures, social and religious differences, and class distinctions all10ng rnore than seventy-five rnillion people. The revolu- tionary struggle had consistently been directed toward gaining independence fi rst and taking up the challenge of so- ci.:ll change later. It was during the procesc; of trying to rneet the challenge and define and unite the republic tha t the specific conditions standing in the way of the search for a stable ahd perrnanent Indonesian identity became apparent. These factors were expressed in é1n initial conflict hetween a well- trained, mandgerial-minded group of Indonesian reforrners and rnore vision- ary elements, addicted to careless revo- lutionary rationali7ations. The conflict was finallj resolved with the assump- tion of fuller powers by Sukarno, the embodirnen t of the visionary approach, who subsequently instituted what he called ((Guided De- rnocracy" and ((Guided Econorny." Not long a fte rw a rd, Sukarno switched frorTI a taCJt partnership with the rnilitary to a more than tdcit partnership with the Indonesian COll1- rnunist Party (Partai Kornunis Indonesia, or P .K.I. ). This alliance ultimately culminated in the Cornm unist-led coup attempt of Sep- ternber 30-0ctober 1, 1965, and the blood- bath that followed, during which between a hundred and fifty thousand and four hun- dred thousand Indonesians, rnostly Cornrnunists or Cornmunist syrnpa- thizers, were rn urdered. As long as Sukarno ran the country, he regarded hirnself not only as the founder of the Indonesian revolution but as the personification of Indonesia and ((the tongue of the Indonesian people." Now that he is out of the pic- ture, the country has taken on a rnore sober rnood, and seerns to feel less irn- pelled to deal with everything-includ- ing the search for national iden tity-in frenzied ernotional terms. Though this is probably a healthy reaction, it has left a vacuum. Indonesia rnay no longer need Sukarno, hut it does need a unifying force of some kind. While the present leaders of Indonesia, rnostly Arrny officers, under Pres'dent Suharto, an ex-officio general-who, like Su- karno and rnany other Indonesians, uses only one narne-ha ve declared their intention of returning to the early, idealistic roots and sources of their country's revolution, they are more irnmediately concerned with the need to repaIr th e econornic and social wreckage Sukarno left behind and with lifting the country out of polItical stagna tlon. II I T was often predicted, on the basis of what had happened in South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, Bur- rna, and rnany of the ernergent African nations, that the rnilItary would eVln- tually take over in Indonesia. N ever- theless, the Arrny's ascendancy seerns, in retrospect, not to have been the in-